Border Takes Quiet Toll Report Shows More Than A Thousand Migrants From Mexico Or Central America Died Trying To Cross The Border Illegally

In police reports, they often have no name and are chiefly described by the clothes they wore when their bodies were found floating in the Rio Grande or the adjacent Franklin Canal here.

A man in his 20s, wearing a beige shirt, brown pants and one blue tennis shoe. A female in her 20s or early 30s, wearing a Tasmanian Devil T-shirt and maroon jeans. A teenage male with a Chicago Bulls T-shirt and black shorts.

Nearly all of them are from Mexico or Central America, police and immigration officials say, and they came here trying to cross the border illegally, hoping to find work in the United States. Instead they drowned in the attempt, part of a group whose numbers have become so large in recent years that on both sides of the border there is a name for them: los desaparecidos, the disappeared.

Some who die are never found, so no one knows the exact number of such fatalities over all. But in the first systematic effort to study these deaths at the border, a recent report by the University of Houston found that over the past four years, 1,185 people had drowned, died of exposure or dehydration or been hit by automobiles while, the authorities concluded, they had been trying to cross the border away from designated checkpoints.

“It’s the equivalent of a large plane load of people crashing every year,” said Nestor Rodriguez, the co-director of the university’s Center for Immigration Research and one of the authors of the report. “But they do not all die at once, so these are like invisible, silent deaths.”

Indeed, the deaths typically happen one or perhaps two at a time and generate little attention, although there are exceptions: Earlier this month in Douglas, Ariz., a group of Mexican citizens was trying to enter the country through an underground drainage pipe that runs from the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta when a sudden storm sent a torrent of rainwater through the pipe.

Five men and one woman died, all of them identified as illegal immigrants; three other men, two women and a 2-year-old child survived by clinging to a ladder. Since then, two more bodies have been discovered in the pipe, both believed to be victims of the same incident.

The death total in the report by the University of Houston amounts to a highly conservative estimate of the problem, the authors say. The report included only cases that could be documented, the authors say, and focused only on counties directly along the 2,000-mile-long border. Dozens more people die of exposure each year trying to evade immigration authorities at checkpoints inside the United States.

In Kenedy County in South Texas, for instance, site of a Border Patrol checkpoint in the town of Sarita that is more than 50 miles north of the border, 19 immigrants died last year of heat stroke and other exposurerelated causes while trying to evade the checkpoint.

Capt. Carlos Garza of the Sheriff’s Department of Jim Wells County, also about 50 miles from the border, said there had been at least 12 such deaths in his area in the past year.

Those who die, of course, are only a fraction of those who successfully make it across the border or even across the lonesome brushland of South Texas, and Capt. Garza doubts the deaths will deter others.

“They’re desperate to get to Houston” and the promise of work, he said. “These people really go through hell trying to get here to create another life.”

The border death toll has risen so greatly over the past decade that the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service has even undertaken a “Stay Out, Stay Alive” campaign, featuring television commercials and newspaper advertisements in Mexico and other countries, warning people about the dangers of evading immigration checkpoints and trying to cross the border illegally.

Drownings, most of them in the Rio Grande of Texas or its associated tributaries and canals, remain the most common form of death among the illegal border crossers.

But while the number of annual deaths documented in the report has held fairly steady, and indeed dropped last year (a drop that was largely attributable to a severe drought, lowering the Rio Grande), there has been a noticeable increase in the number of deaths from what are called environmental factors. These are usually cases in which people die in the desert or deep in the mountains.

Many of the dead are never identified because they put a wallet and other belongings in a plastic bag that floats away. Those who are unidentified are buried in unmarked graves. The families of those with identification are notified and, if the families pay for it, the bodies are shipped back.

Some of the deaths have clearly come about as a result of the muchpublicized crackdowns by the Border Patrol on illegal crossings, with names like “Operation Gatekeeper” in California and “Hold the Line” here in El Paso, prompting many immigrants to take increasingly circuitous and dangerous routes in their bid to make it to the United States.

Immigration authorities insist that even as they discourage illegal immigration, they have carried out hundreds of medical and rescue operations for those who make the attempt and get in trouble.

Still, officials say that many deaths simply cannot be avoided as long as people are determined to enter the country illegally. They also blame unscrupulous smugglers who lead immigrants into the country but then quickly abandon them in the desert or scrubland.

But many advocates for the immigrants say U.S. authorities are knowingly enforcing a policy that directly leads to hundreds of deaths a year.

Garza, in South Texas, described the death of Santos Francisco Sapon Garcia, a 20-year-old Guatemalan who succumbed to heat exhaustion the week before last after crossing the border with a companion at Brownsville and walking 150 miles in 15 days through the harsh scrub, surviving after awhile on the water in cattle troughs and fruit from prickly pear cactus plants. His companion, Dionicio Garcia Lopez, dragged him through the brush in a desperate bid to find medical help, but Sapon had died by the time Garcia got him to a state highway.

Sapon’s second cousin, Diego Caniz, 27, a dishwasher at a Houston restaurant, said poverty they are trying to escape is so great that he is certain others will keep trying to escape it. He pleaded with the U.S. authorities to find some way to help stop the deaths.

“What I know is, he’s dead,” Caniz said of his cousin. “I think an important factor is the migra,” he continued, using a common Spanish term for the Border Patrol. “The more obstacles they have, the more people will be hurt.”

Advocates for the immigrants said the problem would not go away until people focused on solving the root problems of poverty.

The deaths leave families to the south to worry and wonder about what happened to a loved one. In this country, the dead “leave a legacy of unmarked graves all along the border,” in the words of Jacqueline Hagan, a co-director at the University of Houston immigration center and an author of the recent report.

But if the immigrants make it over the border and around the interior checkpoint, Garza said, they know where they are headed. “They follow the stars,” he said, “and just go north.”